Character Description
Chabon reveals a certain flair for judicious use of metaphor as character description. He is good at it but enhances the technique by not overly depending. Thus, when he deploys it, it does draw attention to itself, but the felicitous manner of construction keeps that from being a negative:
“The vein of roguery that had found its purest expression in Sheila’s grandfather, Milton Wiseman, a manufacturer of diet powders and placebo aphrodisiacs, ran thin but rich through Donna’s character.”
Setting
“The Little Knife” takes place at vacation accommodation in Nags Head. The descriptive imagery of this setting is light, depending once again on judiciously placed and rather precise literary techniques like similes to create an overall feeling of isolation and alienation which serve the narrative trek of the story:
“At that time in Nags Head there were few hotels and no condominiums, and it seemed to Nathan that their little ring of cottages stood alone, like Stonehenge, in the middle of a giant wasteland.”
Relationships
Most of the tales in this collection of stories center upon the nature of relationships. As such, one can expect to find metaphorical imagery which comments upon and illuminates the circumstances of those relationships. One of the absolute best reveals in splendidly efficient language the nature of the state of things between the title character of “Blumenthal on the Air” and the immigrant who married him to get a green card:
“Many things fill the distance between me and Roksana, and one of them is the nation of Iran. If you look at a map, I am the Caspian Sea, and she is the Persian Gulf.”
Post-Modern Rules of Etiquette
The rules of etiquette had become quite different for those at the end of the 20th century from what had been the Victorian ideal one-hundred years earlier. And even within time frame, proper behavior was largely dictated not so much upon who you were but where you were in relation to others. Decorum in Laguna Beach seems beyond the reach of the bulk of humanity:
“A certain tyranny of in-touchness holds sway in that part of the world—a compulsion to behave always as though one is still in therapy but making real progress”
Obscure Metaphorical Allusion
In the third decade of the 21st century, Popeye himself is on the verge of disappearing entirely from collective mainstream. Even among those who immediately register everything associated with the character may have trouble recalling the allusion in this metaphor. It’s an oddly obscure choice and one of rare examples where Chabon felicitous touch may have dropped the ball:
“And he saw, as through Chaya’s eyes, that in assuming some of its manly proportions and features, his penis had also begun to take on a concomitant forlorn and humorous aspect, sort of like the Jeep in Popeye cartoons; and he made an apron of his hands and forearms.”
